Janelle burst out laughing and even silent Audrey celebrated the moment with a quick smile. “I’m just playin’ with ya,” the raven-haired Alpha Chick said. “Of course we’ll give you a ride to your car.”
Gary paused, half thankful his instincts had been proven right once again and half pissed off that he had allowed his head to be fucked with, and by a potential victim at that. He made a mental note that when the fun began, he would be sure to do Janelle first. Then he arranged his features into a pleasant smile and trotted forward to join his new friends.
* * *
The interstate on-ramp was only a mile or so from the ice cream stand, which was one reason Gary had selected this particular location. He figured it would seem entirely credible that a healthy young man might suffer car trouble on the highway and hike into town from that distance.
Of course, a reasonable question would be why a person whose car has just broken down—particularly a person driving on a major interstate highway, presumably headed for a destination some great distance away—would be eating ice cream under a shade tree in the nearest town rather than tending to his broken-down car. Gary’s story was going to be that the mechanic who had agreed to look at his vehicle had said it would be several hours before he could get to it, and Gary had needed to get out of the blazing heat for a while. But neither of the girls had asked the question, perhaps because it didn’t occur to either of them or perhaps because neither one cared about the answer.
Gary stretched out in the back of the small four-door Saturn sedan, surprised to find no luggage. He had expected to be crammed into a tiny corner of the back seat, sharing space with suitcases and assorted other items critical to the lives and well-being of two young coeds. “I thought you girls said you were on your way to college,” he remarked. The windows were closed and the vehicle’s air conditioner strained to blast lukewarm air throughout the car’s interior.
Audrey was behind the wheel, and Gary saw her glance quickly at Janelle before the Alpha Chick answered. “We are. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t see any bags or any furniture or, well, anything, for that matter.”
“Oh, that. Well, our things are in the trunk.”
“The trunk of this little thing? You sure do travel light.”
Audrey chuckled uneasily, as if somehow becoming aware of Gary’s evil intent, and then Janelle answered. “Most of our stuff is in storage at school. The first thing we’re going to have to do when we get back is haul everything back to the dorm.”
Audrey giggled and Gary stared at the back of her head. The air blowing from the Saturn’s dashboard vent ruffled her short black hair suggestively. Gary wondered what the hell she found so funny and almost asked, but before he could, Janelle said, “We’ve gone at least a mile since we got onto the highway. Where did you say your car was?”
“Oh, uh, it’s up here just a little farther. Maybe I was more than a mile from town when I broke down. That was just a guess.” Traffic was light on the highway and fields of wheat stretched nearly as far as the eye could see, the tall stalks rustling sluggishly as they were moved around by invisible pockets of hot air. Far off in the distance farmhouses dotted the landscape.
Gary smiled as he daydreamed, picturing what he was going to do to the pretty girls and how much he was going to enjoy the two-for-one special he had stumbled onto, and then realized someone had spoken to him. Janelle had turned around in the front passenger seat and was gazing at him with an unreadable look on her face. “What?” he said. “I was daydreaming.”
“I asked you what kind of car you drive. It’s been almost three miles now since we got on the highway and I haven’t seen a single car in the breakdown lane yet. Your car isn’t really up here on the side of the road, is it?”
Gary sighed. The heat and humidity had drained him and made him feel logy and slow. He wished he could take a short nap but it was time to get to work. Oh, well. No rest for the weary. He flashed a menacing smile at Janelle. “You caught me,” he said flatly. “You’re right. I didn’t break down up here. Guess it was the other direction. Oops.”
He reached into his backpack and pulled out a silver utility knife, depressing the switch and flicking it with his thumb. A razor-sharp blade popped out, winking and glittering in the sunlight streaming through the passenger window. Gary had installed a new blade just this morning, as he always did before searching out a new victim. It had been his experience that the mere sight of the knife was usually enough to ensure compliance, so perhaps replacing the blade every time was nothing more than sheer superstition, but he liked knowing he had the maximum slicing power available before introducing himself to a new girl.
“What’s this all about?” Janelle asked, sounding almost bored. She stared at Gary, her eyes glittering in a way he had never seen before. Maybe she was in shock at the sudden turn of events.
From the driver’s seat Audrey’s voice was tight, like she knew something was wrong but couldn’t quite figure out what it might be. “What the heck’s going on?” She glanced at Janelle, who said nothing, and then twisted in her seat to look into the back of the car and gasped in surprise as Gary sliced the air with the utility knife, making a stabbing motion in front of her eyes.
“Turn around and drive,” he said to Audrey quietly, and then to Janelle, “You’re quite the sharp little cookie. Okay, I’ll come clean. My car’s not broken down on the highway. Not in either direction. In fact, there is no car, broken down or otherwise.”
“Big surprise,” Janelle said drily. “I figured that one out the moment you flashed that blade. This is the thanks we get for offering you a ride. What are you planning on doing with us?”
“Everything.” Gary continued to smile but was a little mystified by the reaction of the raven-haired girl in the front passenger’s seat. This wasn’t his first rodeo, as the saying went; Gary Newton had performed this little “poor me, my car is broken down on the highway” act before, many times, had pretty much perfected the routine, in fact. And in all the times he had played upon the sympathy of innocent young girls to earn their trust, he had never once encountered a non-reaction like the one he was seeing right now from Janelle.
At least Audrey, the driver, reacted the way he expected. After her initial gasp of surprise when Gary flourished the knife in front of her face like some demented Vegas magician, she turned back around in her seat and tensely faced the windshield, offering up the occasional half-hearted whimper, clearly working to keep herself together.
The Janelle bitch, though, the one Gary had decided was the Alpha Chick, just continued staring at him like his fly was open or something. If there was any fear in her demeanor she was keeping it well hidden. She seemed more affronted by the notion that he would take advantage of them than anything else. Well, she had no fucking idea. He hadn’t begun to take advantage of them yet.
Gary heard more than felt the car’s momentum begin to slow. The whine of tires traveling sixty miles per hour over hot pavement, audible even above the hiss of the overmatched air conditioning, changed slightly, the high-pitched sound beginning to lower.
He leaned forward in his seat and slipped the utility knife under Audrey’s chin. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“What? What’s wrong?” she said.
“You’re slowing the car down. Don’t even fucking think about slowing down until I tell you to, do you understand?”
“I understand,” she answered immediately, and Gary felt added resistance as the car again picked up speed. He didn’t know if she had slowed on purpose or simply because she was frightened, but it didn’t matter either way. The important thing was ensuring these dim bulb bitches knew exactly who was in charge, and he had accomplished that goal quite nicely.
Gary decided to reinforce his message. He flicked the switch with his thumb and the blade disappeared. The instant it did, he flicked the metal of the utility knife along the driver’s throat and she gasped again, covering the spot with her left hand
instinctively, then pulling it away and examining her palm for blood.
Gary laughed cruelly. He couldn’t have asked for a more perfect response. “Don’t worry, I didn’t cut you. This time. Just do exactly as you’re told, exactly when you’re told to do it, and no one will get hurt. Everyone will be happy. Or at least I will.”
He removed the knife from Audrey’s neck, still chuckling, and leaned back in his seat, glancing at Janelle as he did. She continued watching him closely, still exhibiting virtually no fear or surprise. “Something you want to say to me?” he challenged. She said nothing.
“Good. Then let’s just drive and we’ll all get along fine.”
* * *
The sun eased below the western horizon, lowering the glare for the three people inside the car but doing little to cool the outside temperature. The superheated air shimmied in the distance, lending a surreal cast to the endless acres of farmland surrounding the highway.
Gary knew they would have to stop soon. He needed to pee and figured the girls probably did as well, although neither one of them had mentioned it yet. Surprisingly, neither of his reluctant traveling companions had said much of anything for the last couple of hours, after their initial expressions of shock and outrage at being hijacked.
This was a surprising and somewhat unsettling development, not that he would ever admit such a thing to his prospective victims. Gary Newton had been worming his way inside the vehicles of young, single women for a long time, longer than he cared to admit, and then doing socially unacceptable things to them, and never once in all that time had he received a less concerned response.
In Gary’s experience, these things always played out within a fairly predictable range of emotions. The girl would initially register disbelief at what was happening to her, then anger at being duped, and then, for the remainder of the drive—at least until he found a quiet, out-of-the-way location to play—a steadily increasing fear as she tried to bargain her way out of what had to seem a pretty black fate. Which, of course, it was.
But Gary had no real experience with kidnapping two girls at once. There was the time a couple of years ago when he ingratiated himself with the mother of a potential victim, earning a ride, initially, with both. And the mummy had been pretty yummy, too, but he quickly eliminated her, guessing, correctly as it turned out, that seeing her mother murdered before her eyes and then dumped on the side of the road would make the real target that much easier to control.
So, taking the two girls today was a fairly major change in his routine. Perhaps the dynamics were different with two victims in the car instead of just one. Maybe the presence of the other person was comforting to each of them, somehow. Maybe they figured only one of them was in any real danger and each one hoped the other would be the one to get the axe.
Or maybe they just didn’t quite grasp the seriousness of the situation. Gary was an expert at appearing meek and mild and harmless—at disguising his true nature, in other words—so when he finally chose to reveal that nature to his victims it always came as somewhat of a shock. Maybe the girls still didn’t see him as a real threat.
They would find out differently soon enough.
A gigantic blue roadside sign bordered with reflective tape flashed past on the right. MOTORIST SERVICES—15 MILES, it said. “Whaddaya say, girls, anybody ready for a little rest break?” Gary thumbed the switch on top of the silver utility knife and the blade snapped open, as if punctuating his question.
The girls looked at each other but neither one spoke. Gary prodded, “Or am I the only one who has to pee?”
Still no answer. “Come on, ladies, don’t be shy. We’re going to get to know each other much more intimately soon enough, you might just as well begin opening up to me. No pun intended.”
More silence from the front seat. “Well, I don’t know about you two, but I tend to get all tired and cranky if I ride too long without a break to at least stretch my legs, and I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing your two pairs of legs all stretched out again, so I vote for a stop. Who’s with me?”
The constant silence was beginning to irritate Gary. He didn’t appreciate being ignored, especially as he was the one holding all the cards. Didn’t they understand that? And it was a little disconcerting as well, like they thought they knew something he didn’t. He hated bitches that played those kinds of fucking mind games.
“ANSWER ME!” he shouted, his voice seeming to echo throughout the cabin of the little car. He raised his knife and slashed at the roof and tiny pieces of shredded foam floated down onto the back seat like the first flakes of a winter snowstorm.
Audrey jumped satisfactorily and let out a squeak of surprise and fear but Janelle just said, “Whatever,” in a bored voice, and right then and there Gary decided to change his plan. Instead of doing Janelle first because she had pissed him off by making fun of him back at the ice cream stand, he decided he would do her more submissive friend first. He would make it painful and ugly and messy for Audrey, too, just so Janelle could get a good look at what was in store for her. Let her think about that for a while, see how cool and collected she was then.
He was tempted to cut her now, not badly enough to kill her, not yet, but just enough to make it hurt, to make clear to the cocky bitch exactly who was in charge, because she didn’t seem to have gotten the message yet. But injuring her would complicate things unnecessarily and might even make her harder to handle in the short term. So he controlled his emotions—admirably, he thought, given the circumstances—and simply said, in a voice tight from the strain of suppressed anger, “Did you see the motorist services sign back there?”
Audrey nodded. “Yes, I saw it,” she said in a small voice.
“We won’t be turning there.”
“But I thought you said—”
“You thought what? That we were going to stop at the rest area, act like one big happy family, a guy with his two girlfriends maybe? You thought we would walk arm-in-arm into the plaza and you two would waltz into the Ladies room while I went to the Mens? Is that what you thought? Do you really think I’m that stupid?”
“I never—”
“Just drive past the motorist services plaza and take the next exit off the highway. These towns out here in the sticks are about the size of a mole on an elephant’s ass, so I guarantee we’ll find somewhere nice and private to take care of business.”
Audrey clamped her mouth shut and did as she was told. Gary eased back in the seat and shook his head at the stubbornness and stupidity of some people in this world. The car continued along the highway, Gary Newton snapping the blade of his utility knife open and closed, the sound loud and clear inside the otherwise silent cabin.
* * *
The name of the place was Lore City, Ohio, and calling it a city had to be some kind of inside joke. It barely qualified as a village; if more than three hundred people lived in the whole damn “city” he would be amazed. Gary had never heard of it and he had been criss-crossing the Midwest for years.
Audrey had taken the first exit after the motorist services plaza, as instructed, and they had driven fifteen minutes or so on one of the most deserted roads Gary had ever seen. It wasn’t yet nine o’clock at night and the road crossed a major interstate highway, and despite all that it felt like the thoroughfare that time forgot. Occasionally a lone vehicle would pass them going the other direction toward the interstate, but otherwise not a soul could be seen.
Eventually they drove into a flyspeck of a community and within minutes, Gary found exactly what he was looking for: a broken-down, deserted business. This particular deserted business was an ice cream stand, of all things. The small, weathered wood-frame building sagged badly, as if no longer able to manage the effort required to stand upright and square. A sign in front of the building read KONE KING – Ohio’s Best Ice cream! At least that was Gary’s best guess; the exact wording was difficult to make out. Strips of peeling paint hung like icicles from the sign, and the paint that remained had years
ago given up in its battle against the elements.
It was perfect.
“Turn here,” he said, glancing quickly in all directions to ensure there was no one around who might be curious why a car containing three people would enter the site of an obviously long-abandoned business. It wouldn’t do to be harassed by local law enforcement, if there even was any. This town was so tiny, Gary doubted it featured a full-time police department.
But in any event, there wasn’t a police car in sight. There wasn’t anything in sight, in fact. No little kids outside playing, no old geezers out for a walk, nothing. The crushing heat and humidity seemed to have made prisoners of Lore City’s few residents, trapping them inside their homes; it seemed they preferred the comfort of air conditioning to the benefits of outdoor exercise.
Audrey turned the car into the lot and it bounced slowly over the crumbling pavement. This shithole had obviously not been a viable business for years, maybe decades, and Gary wondered why the owner had never torn down the eyesore. Maybe he croaked and his next of kin couldn’t be bothered. Maybe he croaked and there was no next of kin. Gary didn’t know and didn’t care; the run-down testament to failure suited his needs perfectly.
The pavement ended at the side of the structure but behind it was roughly an eight foot wide swath of overgrown weeds that at one time had been someone’s idea of a lawn. Beyond that was a tangle of ornamental shrubbery that had long ago grown wild, and beyond that a thicket of trees stood, towering and ancient and as good as any fence at providing cover.
Heartless (Delirium Novella Series) Page 2